Women, feminism, and geek culture

Linkspam 2: Electric Boogaloo (8 February 2013)

Impostor Syndrome, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4: “So just like social capital is unevenly distributed, impostor syndrome is too. For any given person, coping is a fixed resource; when you go through life getting told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that people of your gender or your race, or people whose bodies look like yours or who think and communicate the way you do, or people with your sexuality or your economic class, just aren’t good enough (and must, if they do well, only be doing well because they were given a “handout”), you tend not to have a lot of coping left to sustain yourself in a challenging and often hostile academic environment.”

And Read All Over | Jamelle Bouie: “If the majority of technology users belonged to a select demographic group, this would make more sense, but that’s not the case at all: Gadgets are used by everyone.”

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We explore healthcare scientists’ accounts of men in healthcare science laboratories. By focussing on subtle masculinist actions that women find disadvantageous to them, we seek to extend knowledge about women’s under-representation in senior positions in healthcare science – despite women being in the majority at junior levels. We maintain that healthcare science continues to be dominated by taken-for-granted masculinities that marginalize women, keeping them in their ‘place’. Our aim is to make visible the subtle practices that are normally invisible by showing masculinities in action. Principally using feminist analyses, our findings show that both women and men are often unaware of taken-for-granted masculinist actions, and even when women do notice, they rarely challenge the subtle sexist behaviour.